In April 2011, Wellington College was looking to refresh its existing wireless network to deliver better speed and performance. After thoroughly researching the market, Wellington College put together a brief to upgrade its old managed system to a faster network that would scale more easily. Wellington trialed three solutions and Meraki was a clear winner in terms of speed of set up, scale, performance and coverage.

Tony Whelton, Director of IT Services for Wellington College comments: “We needed to create an environment that was easily scalable and that could grow organically as demand on the network is variable over the course of the year. For example, we often hold large conferences on campus for up to 1000 people and need to be able to easily add Wi-Fi points in odd places, such as a cricket pitch.

“We had Meraki up and running in less than an hour. The technology also provided 50 percent better coverage than other solutions that we trialed which meant we needed less access points and, when we wanted to add access points, it was easy. The interface is so straightforward it doesn’t require any support, training or consultancy - we were able to use our own in-house skills to deploy at ease and speed. I was also able to segment network access so the staff and the students are separate from each other which was great from a security point of view.”

Wellington also uses the product for ongoing network management and in particular visibility. With Meraki, Tony can see bandwidth usage in every area of the college. For example, he can pick a particular boarding house and with Meraki he can monitor what applications are accessed on the network such as Skype, YouTube etc.

Wellington now has four busy Wi-FI networks in operation. One for staff; with elevated privileges, one for pupils, one for guests and one for members of its sports facility. Each is controlled by using a captive portal and log on where users authenticate themselves. With over 1,500 people on campus at any given time, the Wi-Fi network enjoys incredibly high usage.

Greg Harris, co-founder of Cloud Distribution comments: “Meraki has already been deployed in over 18,000 customer networks worldwide, was named a visionary in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Wireless LAN and has been awarded Techworld’s Wireless and Mobility Product of the Year. It is a very credible technology and we are seeing great pick up here in the UK. Wellington College is a great use case of the solution and demonstrates how well the product performs in comparison to the competition.”

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About Cloud Distribution
Cloud Distribution is a Value Added Distributor focusing on the security, management and optimisation of devices which access the Cloud. Cloud computing is a paradigm of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualised resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the ‘Cloud’ that supports them.

The company was founded by senior executives with a wealth of experience in the security and optimisation space. Its philosophy is to take innovative, leading-edge vendors into the UK market by recruiting and partnering with innovative, pioneering security, management and optimisation partners.

c8 Consulting is the premier marketing agency serving Reading, the Thames Valley, as well as more widely across the UK and the globe. We offer a range of services from high profile event planning and management to public relations to specialist ...